The IROS paper was submitted 10 minutes before the deadline on March 1st.  The paper was okay, but I’m not thrilled about it because it is only the beginning stages of the work.  So, it doesn’t really use the bounty hunting stuff to its fullest.  Future papers will hopefully provide that.  We also had to create a video.  Ermo and I got the footage of the Pioneer doing the visual servoing on the ball both indoors and semi-successfully outdoors (either due to lighting or to the massively long ping times was not able always stop in time before running into the ball).

Now that is over I’m taking a bit of a break from working with robots and am working with Ermo to do some research in continuous action multiagent learning (CAMAL our acronym, don’t steal it!).  It has been a ton of fun!  I’ve been doing derivations and learning new math (and re-learning some old math!).  Getting to work out how the equations and proofs of convergence happen I believe will aid me in my work with doing proofs of convergence with bounty hunting in the future.  So, it is benefiting Ermo and me at the same time and we are having fun in the process :)!  We are working on this for a paper in NIPS.  If our algorithm concept is successful and we can show some convergence we should have a very strong NIPS paper.  David is also trying to join in and we can greatly use his help as it is a very challenging problem.  Main issue is he is still taking classes.  Can’t wait for his classes to be done!

Dan wants us to write up a paper for the Robocup Symposium on how we were able to adjust the behaviors to work with a robot that could not turn that well using HiTAB (our learning from demonstration software).  That is due March 25!  He just told us about it this monday.  Thankfully though we won’t have to produce any experiments or results we just need to write about what we did.  So we are actually pushing that off until the 22nd because Ermo and I need to make a poster and a slide for GMU’s first CS symposium.  Just what we need, not!  The really frustrating part is that it is mandatory for all CS PhD students to attend and those selected to present are required to present!  So, it is not optional.  I guess they figured no one would show up otherwise.